There was a timely reminder from George W Bush last week that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wasn't always the world's most deranged political leader. On Wednesday, as the president of Iran coped with the fallout from the less-than-reliable election results in his own country, Bush – who came to power in 2000 in murkier circumstances than anything we've seen in Iran recently – made his first substantial speech of the Obama era. It was, unsurprisingly, a devil's brew of self-justification and special pleading, in defiance of all known facts.

Much of Obama's first five months in office have been spent fixing the damage – in the economy, in international relations – bequeathed to him by Bush, and so far he has been performing ably. Americans, who despised Bush by the time he left the White House, approve of Obama in large numbers. The US economy, while far from recovered from the excesses of the Bush years, is at least approaching the corner around which it will turn later this year or early in 2010. Internationally, much of the rest of the world seems more comfortable with the US than at any time since Bush threw away the global goodwill towards America that followed the 11 September attacks.

Not that Bush was having any of it. As far as he was concerned, he'd done a heck of a job. His actions on the economy had been sound, he said, particularly in the last few months of his presidency, which is when the consequences of his fiscal policy started to hit home. He had protected the US from terrorist attacks, he said, ignoring the fact that 9/11 happened on his watch, two months after the White House had been warned by the CIA that al-Qaeda would soon launch an attack on the US. He purported to have the authority to criticise Obama for his desire to close down Guantanamo Bay. "There are people at Gitmo who will kill American people at the drop of a hat," he said. This is true, in some cases, which is why Obama has no intention of releasing the hardcore prisoners, but instead wants to transfer them to supermax detention facilities, from which nobody has ever escaped. The White House responded to Bush's diatribe with some carefully measured references to the several fiascos it had inherited from him. Not that we needed it, but the reminder about the contrast between America then and America now was very welcome.

Seán Garland from Co Meath is somebody else who is trying to cope with the consequences and inventions of the Bush administration's terrorism policy. On 21 November last year, a few weeks after the American people had voted overwhelmingly for Obama, Bush's secretary of state Condoleezza Rice personally signed an extradition request for 75-year-old Garland, whom the US believes is involved in a major counterfeiting operation involving North Korea and the Russia mafia. The evidence against Garland is practically non-existent and the extradition request is expressed in such general terms as to be meaningless. Garland appeared before the High Court last month; a full hearing of his case is scheduled to be heard in July.

Garland has a colourful past. A former member of the IRA, he led the 1957 attack on Brookeborough barracks in which Seán South and Feargal O'Hanlon, subsequently feted in song, were killed. He later attempt­ed to lead the IRA away from violence and towards left-wing politics, although he was unsuccessful in both quests. The INLA tried to kill him in 1975. At 75, he is suffering from several serious illnesses including diabetes and angina. He has also developed bowel and prostate cancer. Former FF senator Eddie Bohan believes Garland would not last two months in a US jail.

A campaign to oppose Garland's extradition was launched last week and is supported by a wide and lively cross-section of political figures – from Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams to Ulster Unionist Chris McGimpsey; from Fianna Fáil's Chris Andrews to Labour's Joanna Tuffy – as well as writers, actors and barristers. "It is not necessary to hold the same political worldview as another person to recognise them as a person of integrity," said Chris Hudson, founder of the Peace Train movement in the 1980s. As Garland and the US were part of the "tapestry of the peace process", he argued, it would serve no purpose to extradite him.

Others oppose the extradition because they don't believe there is any evidence against Garland; others because of Garland's age and ill-health. Perhaps the best reason is that the extradition warrant is a hangover from the Bush administration, with all that means in terms of unreliable intelligence, lack of evidence and outright dishonesty.

Hopefully, the High Court will feel the same.

Collared 'Ted' creator 'mail' nastiness

Hero of my week was Graham Linehan, the co-creator of Father Ted, who used his Twitter account to undermine an online Daily Mail question about Travellers, or gypsies, as it called them. On Friday, in response to some nonsensical story which offended its reactionary heart, the Mail (no less nutty an organ in the UK than in Ireland) asked: "Should gypsies be allowed to jump the NHS queue?" Mail readers would normally recommend that gypsies be impaled on a rusty pitchfork but, thanks to Linehan's Twitter campaign, they weren't the only ones to get involved. At the time of writing, on Friday, 85% of people who have answered the question believe that, yes, gypsies should be allowed to jump the NHS queue. Congrats to Linehan for exposing the Mail for the nasty little rag that it is.

ddoyle@tribune.ie